Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Communication is a fundamental process that allows animals to effectively transfer information between groups or individuals. Recognition plays an essential role in permitting animals to distinguish individuals based upon both communicatory and non-communicatory signals allowing animals to direct suitable behaviours towards them. Several modes of recognition exist and in colonial breeding animals which congregate in large numbers, acoustic signalling is thought to be the most effective as it suffers less from environmental degradation. Otariid seals (fur seals and sea lions) are generally colonial breeding species which congregate at high densities on offshore islands. In contrast to the other Arctocephaline species, the Australian fur seal, Arctocephalus pusillus doriferus, along with its conspecific, the Cape fur seal, A. p. pusillus, display many of the behavioural traits of sea lions. This may have important consequences in terms of its social structure and evolution. The acoustic communication of Australian fur seals was studied on Kanowna Island, Bass Strait, Australia. Analysing the acoustic structure of vocalisations and their use facilitates our understanding of the social function of calls in animal communication. The vocal repertoires of males, females, pups and yearlings were characterised and their behavioural context examined. Call structural variations in males were evident with changes in behavioural context, indicating parallel changes in the emotive state of sender. For a call to be used in vocal recognition it must display stereotypy within callers and variation between them. In Australian fur seal females and pups, individuals were found to have unique calls. Mutual mother-pup recognition has been suggested for otariids and this study supports the potential for this process to occur through the use of vocalisations. Call structural changes in pup vocalisations were also investigated over the progression of the year, from birth to weaning. Vocalisations produced by pups increased in duration, lowered in both the number of parts per call and the harmonic band containing the maximum frequency as they became older, suggesting calls are changing constantly as pups grow toward maturity. It has been suggested through descriptive reports, that the bark call produced by males is important to vocal recognition. The present study quantified this through the analysis of vocalisations produced by male Australian fur seals. Results support descriptive evidence suggesting that male barks can be used to discriminate callers. Traditional playback studies further confirmed that territorial male Australian fur seals respond significantly more to the calls of strangers than to those of neighbours, supporting male vocal recognition. This study modified call features of the bark to determine the importance to vocal recognition. The results indicate that the whole frequency spectrum was important to recognition. There was also an increase in response from males when they heard more bark units, indicating the importance of repetition by a caller. Recognition occurred when males heard between 25-75% of each bark unit, indicating that the whole duration of each bark unit is not necessary for recognition to occur. This may have particular advantages for communication in acoustically complex breeding environments, where parts of calls may be degraded by the environment. The present study examined the life history characteristics of otariids to determine the factors likely to influence and shape its vocal behaviour. Preliminary results indicate that female density, body size and the breeding environment all influence the vocal behaviour of otariids, while duration of lactation and the degree of polygyny do not appear to be influential. Understanding these interactions may help elucidate how vocal recognition and communication have evolved in different pinniped species.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Communication is a fundamental process that allows animals to effectively transfer information between groups or individuals. Recognition plays an essential role in permitting animals to distinguish individuals based upon both communicatory and non-communicatory signals allowing animals to direct suitable behaviours towards them. Several modes of recognition exist and in colonial breeding animals which congregate in large numbers, acoustic signalling is thought to be the most effective as it suffers less from environmental degradation. Otariid seals (fur seals and sea lions) are generally colonial breeding species which congregate at high densities on offshore islands. In contrast to the other Arctocephaline species, the Australian fur seal, Arctocephalus pusillus doriferus, along with its conspecific, the Cape fur seal, A. p. pusillus, display many of the behavioural traits of sea lions. This may have important consequences in terms of its social structure and evolution. The acoustic communication of Australian fur seals was studied on Kanowna Island, Bass Strait, Australia. Analysing the acoustic structure of vocalisations and their use facilitates our understanding of the social function of calls in animal communication. The vocal repertoires of males, females, pups and yearlings were characterised and their behavioural context examined. Call structural variations in males were evident with changes in behavioural context, indicating parallel changes in the emotive state of sender. For a call to be used in vocal recognition it must display stereotypy within callers and variation between them. In Australian fur seal females and pups, individuals were found to have unique calls. Mutual mother-pup recognition has been suggested for otariids and this study supports the potential for this process to occur through the use of vocalisations. Call structural changes in pup vocalisations were also investigated over the progression of the year, from birth to weaning. Vocalisations produced by pups increased in duration, lowered in both the number of parts per call and the harmonic band containing the maximum frequency as they became older, suggesting calls are changing constantly as pups grow toward maturity. It has been suggested through descriptive reports, that the bark call produced by males is important to vocal recognition. The present study quantified this through the analysis of vocalisations produced by male Australian fur seals. Results support descriptive evidence suggesting that male barks can be used to discriminate callers. Traditional playback studies further confirmed that territorial male Australian fur seals respond significantly more to the calls of strangers than to those of neighbours, supporting male vocal recognition. This study modified call features of the bark to determine the importance to vocal recognition. The results indicate that the whole frequency spectrum was important to recognition. There was also an increase in response from males when they heard more bark units, indicating the importance of repetition by a caller. Recognition occurred when males heard between 25-75% of each bark unit, indicating that the whole duration of each bark unit is not necessary for recognition to occur. This may have particular advantages for communication in acoustically complex breeding environments, where parts of calls may be degraded by the environment. The present study examined the life history characteristics of otariids to determine the factors likely to influence and shape its vocal behaviour. Preliminary results indicate that female density, body size and the breeding environment all influence the vocal behaviour of otariids, while duration of lactation and the degree of polygyny do not appear to be influential. Understanding these interactions may help elucidate how vocal recognition and communication have evolved in different pinniped species.

Speech signal is basically meant to carry the information about the linguistic message. But, it also contains the speaker-specific information. It is generated by acoustically exciting the cavities of the mouth and nose, and can be used to recognize (identify/verify) a person. This thesis deals with the speaker identification task; i.e., to find the identity of a person using his/her speech from a group of persons already enrolled during the training phase. Listeners use many audible cues in identifying speakers. These cues range from high level cues such as semantics and linguistics of the speech, to low level cues relating to the speaker's vocal tract and voice source characteristics. Generally, the vocal tract characteristics are modeled in modern day speaker identification systems by cepstral coefficients. Although, these coeficients are good at representing vocal tract information, they can be supplemented by using both pitch and voicing information. Pitch provides very important and useful information for identifying speakers. In the current speaker recognition systems, it is very rarely used as it cannot be reliably extracted, and is not always present in the speech signal. In this thesis, an attempt is made to utilize this pitch and voicing information for speaker identification. This thesis illustrates, through the use of a text-independent speaker identification system, the reasonable performance of the cepstral coefficients, achieving an identification error of 6%. Using pitch as a feature in a straight forward manner results in identification errors in the range of 86% to 94%, and this is not very helpful. The two main reasons why the direct use of pitch as a feature does not work for speaker recognition are listed below. First, the speech is not always periodic; only about half of the frames are voiced. Thus, pitch can not be estimated for half of the frames (i.e. for unvoiced frames). The problem is how to account for pitch information for the unvoiced frames during recognition phase. Second, the pitch estimation methods are not very reliable. They classify some of the frames unvoiced when they are really voiced. Also, they make pitch estimation errors (such as doubling or halving of pitch value depending on the method). In order to use pitch information for speaker recognition, we have to overcome these problems. We need a method which does not use the pitch value directly as feature and which should work for voiced as well as unvoiced frames in a reliable manner. We propose here a method which uses the autocorrelation function of the given frame to derive pitch-related features. We call these features the maximum autocorrelation value (MACV) features. These features can be extracted for voiced as well as unvoiced frames and do not suffer from the pitch doubling or halving type of pitch estimation errors. Using these MACV features along with the cepstral features, the speaker identification performance is improved by 45%.

L’information "identité individuelle" est essentielle chez les espèces fortement sociales car elle permet la reconnaissance individuelle et la différenciation des partenaires sociaux dans de nombreux contextes tels que les relations de dominance, les relations mère-jeunes, la défense territoriale, ou encore participe à la cohésion et coordination de groupe. Chez de nombreuses espèces, le canal audio est l’une des voies les plus efficaces de communication dans des environnementscomplexes et à longue distance. Les vocalisations sont empreintes de caractéristiques acoustiques propres à la voix de chaque individu. La combinaison entre ces signatures vocales individuelles et la connaissance sociale accumulée sur les congénères peut grandement favoriser la valeur sélective des animaux, en facilitant notamment les prises de décisions sociales les plus adaptées. Le but de ma recherche est d’étudier le codage et décodage de l’information "identité individuelle" du système vocal de communication du bonobo, Pan paniscus. Premièrement, nous avons recherché la stabilité des signatures vocales des cinq types de cris les plus courants du répertoire du bonobo. Nous avons trouvé que, bien que ces cinq types de cris aient le potentiel de coder l’information individuelle, les cris les plus forts émis dans des contextes d’excitation intense et de communication à longue distance ont les signatures vocales individuelles les plus marquées. Deuxièmement, nous avons étudié l’effet de la familiarité sociale et des liens de parenté sur les caractéristiquesacoustiques qui codent l’information individuelle dans un type de cri "bark". Nous avons mis en évidence l’existence d’une forte convergence vocale. Les individus apparentés et familiers, et indépendamment l’un de l’autre, présentent plus desimilarités vocales qu’entre des individus non apparentés et non familiers. Enfin, dans une troisième étude, nous avons testé la capacité des bonobos à utiliser l’information "identité individuelle" codée dans les vocalisations pour discriminer la voix d’anciens partenaires sociaux avec qui ils ne vivent plus. Par une série d’expériences de repasse, nous avons démontré que les bonobos étaient capables de reconnaître la voix d’individus familiers sur la seule base de l’acoustique, et cela même après des années de séparation. L’ensemble de ce travail de thèse montre que le codage et décodage de l’information "identité individuelle" chez le bonobo est un système dynamique, sujet à modification avec l’environnement social mais suffisamment fiable pour permettre la reconnaissance individuelle au cours du temps. En conclusion cette étude participe à une meilleure compréhension du système de communication vocale chez un primate non-humain forestier, au réseau social unique et complexe / Identity information is vital for highly social species as it facilitates individual recognition and allows for differentiation between social partners in many contexts, such as dominance hierarchies, territorial defence, mating and parent-offspringidentification and group cohesion and coordination. In many species vocalisations can be the most effective communication channel through complex environments and over long-distances and are encoded with the stable features of an individual’s voice. Associations between these individual vocal signatures and accumulated social knowledge about conspecifics can greatly increase an animal’s fitness, as it facilitates adaptively constructive social decisions. This thesis investigates the encoding and decoding of identity information in the vocal communication system of the bonobo, Pan paniscus. We firstly investigated the stability of vocal signatures across the five most common call types in the bonobo vocal repertoire. Results showed that while all call types have the potential to code identity information, loud calls used during times of high arousal and for distance communication have the strongest individual vocal signatures. Following the first study, we investigated if social familiarity and relatedness affect the acoustic features that code individual information in the bark call type. Overall, we found strong evidence for vocal convergence, and specifically, that individuals who are related and familiar, independently from one another, are more vocally similar to one another than unrelated and unfamiliar individuals. In a final study we tested if bonobos are capable of using the encoded identity information to recognise past group members that they no longer live with. Through a series playback experiments we demonstrated that bonobos are capable of recognising familiar individuals from vocalisations alone even after years of separation. Collectively, the results of this thesis show that the encoding and decoding of identity information in bonobo vocalisations is a dynamic system, subject to modification through social processes but robust enough to allow for individual recognition over time. In conclusion these studies contribute to a better understanding of the vocal communication system of a non-human primate species with a unique and complex social network